


daedalus, landing

by Contra



Category: Der Himmel über Berlin | Wings of Desire (1987), Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 20th Century Germany, M/M, Tho you dont need to know the movie for this, Wings of Desire au, with everything that entails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-18 00:50:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Contra/pseuds/Contra
Summary: AU in which their city is Berlin instead of London. // Alternate Title: The Sky over Berlin





	daedalus, landing

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a fuckload of things, most importantly:
> 
> [Wings of Desire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPyWp4DtzSg), a 1987 movie classic set in then-separated Berlin, about an angel who falls in love with a trapeze artist. The German title, Der Himmel über Berlin, is better though.
> 
> [Görlitzer Park by Daniel Kahn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VoMrvOzYCQ) which is one of the best songs about Berlin ever written.

Nothing is holy the way Jerusalem is holy. The walls are holy, even the ones that were torn down millennia ago. The air is holy. The _stones_ are holy.

Berlin is nothing like that.

Crowley prefers it, though. For one, it doesn’t burn his feet.

There’s a big golden angel on top of the Siegessäule – _Goldelse –_ and there’s an actual angel sitting at its feet, and though he's not made of precious metals, he's wearing a coat that was all the rage in Paris ca. 1788. He looks over the city, sprawling and uneven and in all the places where Jerusalem is light and shining, it is grey.

His name is Aziraphale. He’s here to listen, nothing more. He can hear the thoughts of everyone in the city. It sings to him. It’s a dirty rainy November morning and he feels outside of time. He – like most of them - is new in Berlin.

It’s around the fin de siècle and Crowley works at a bar, the cheap kind, the no-good kind, the kind you only frequent if you’ve been abandoned by all good spirits, as the saying goes.

“Have you?” A voice asks from the other side of the counter. Crowley looks up and smiles.

This is the first time they meet since Eden. It feels even longer than that.

Crowley puts down the glass he’s polishing, the stranger (except he is no stranger, is he?) throws down something bearing only a passing resemblance to a one-Mark coin. It’s rare that heavenly creatures find their way to this city, so far out of the way of anything Ineffable, but if they do, he guesses, they deserve a drink.

He hands over a Berliner Weisse and squints. “We’ve met, right?”

The stranger – The Angel Of The Eastern Gate – smiles bashfully and sips.

It’s good, having someone from home.

“It’s still home, isn’t it?” The angel asks, though he must know that it’s the second consecutive question he won’t receive an answer to, then he seems to remember his manners and sticks out his hand. “Aziraphale.”

“Crowley,” Crowley says, doesn’t shake it. “So, what did you do to end up here?”

The angel only raises an eyebrow. He’s wearing an expensive looking coat, the kind angels don't normally go for, at least from Crowley’s experience, which to be fair is about three centuries out of date.

“What makes you think I did anything?” There’s a sharp defiance in his voice and suddenly Crowley remembers. The guy used to have a flaming sword.

“Not the kind of place they send you if they like you,” he explains. That sword, two naked humans covered in leaves. Damnation is simple when you get down to it. So is life, so is Berlin.

“No place is beyond heaven,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley smiles. “I guess you haven't been here for long.”

They meet up semi-regularly after that, the way expats do in foreign countries even when they have nothing in common except a shared strangeness and a slowly fading mother tongue. “Can you still hear them?” Aziraphale asks. The inner mechanics of Falling have never interested him and yet, suddenly, they hold a deep fascination.

Crowley shakes his head. They’re at the feet of the Goldelse again. Both of them, this time. It’s beautiful to be so high up, to be this close to the clouds again. “Only if I ask. Can't fly, either.”

Below them, a woman is carrying her baby and worrying about making rent, now that her husband is dead. There’s a girl with a dandelion in her hair, meeting her lover, she’s happy for now though she knows she has to be back home before her family notices. There’s a child, its soul still immortal, thinking about bonbons. “Do you? Ask, I mean.”

They look at the women. They look very long at the child.

Aziraphale can’t see the future, exactly, but fate is like a ball of strings and so very carefully, he pulls. He will die at age nineteen in a trench in Verdun. He will die crying. Crowley shrugs. “Most of the time, I just kind of know.”

They don’t fall in love.

The Great War breaks out and they don’t. They don’t fall in love.

“Is this coming from your side?” Aziraphale asks and Crowley only laughs, “I’ve got no side anymore, what do you think I’m doing here,” and when Aziraphale wants to protest (I can smell the sulphur sticking to you like tar, like little rootless weeds that only grow in graveyards) Crowley leans back and murmurs “and neither do you.”

Aziraphale would protest, if he knew what that meant.

The revolution sweeps the Kaiser out of his castle and that’s when Aziraphale tells Crowley about Paris, his last assignment.

“I thought it was _supposed_ to be,” he explains and he feels so incredibly stupid, “I thought there was supposed to be a king, so I tried to help, except Michael wouldn’t have it.”

Crowley laughs until he’s blue in the face, until there’s no air left anywhere in his lungs, until he even forgets that that doesn’t technically matter. “That is-” he gasps “The most ridiculous story I have ever heard. You got demoted to ass-of-the-world-duty because you were _counterrevolutionary_. By literal heaven. Genuinely, how?”

Aziraphale shrugs. “I mean, the point is hierarchy, right? Leading people towards good? Why _wouldn’t_ we give them the safety of a god-appointed ruler and spare them all that grief. Look at revolutions-”

(The Spartakus fighters are dying around them. Crowley doesn’t tell him, not yet, but he goes to the barricades at night sometimes. There’s little more he can do except watch them die. They die for good things, though. As an immortal, he can appreciate that.)

“-all that blood and fighting over completely pointless things. I only tried to help. Michael didn’t see it that way, though. So I got sent to Berlin instead.”

It’s not as funny when he thinks about it, Crowley realizes. “It’s not pointless. It’s about freedom.”

“Freedom from what?” Aziraphale asks and it’s a very, very _angelic_ thing to say.

“Us,” Crowley answers. “This. Hierarchy. Heaven. People telling them what to do.”

“But they’re _wrong.”_ Aziraphale’s voice still sounds like Jerusalem. It’s been centuries since Crowley saw it last. It's been millennia since he fell. “They don’t know what to do. They’re just… stumbling around in the dark and damning themselves.”

“So you’ll save them?” Crowley counters. There are police officers with their ugly pointy Pickelhauben hats, they have rifles, they have horses, they have power. They shout and they shoot and they trample. “Tell them what to do, drag them to salvation, who cares about choice and responsibility?”

“You don’t get it,” Aziraphale sounds exasperated. “You don’t-” He takes a deep breath. “ _I can hear them._ They all pray for that. They all pray for salvation. One way or another.”

The police officers are thinking, I don’t want to shoot this man, who looks like my brother. I don’t want him to shoot me. I want him to go home and just stop doing what he is doing and instead work an honest job and I want to not be here only slightly less than I don’t want _him_ to be here.

Crowley thinks, _I_ prayed for salvation.

And the thing is, he did.

Aziraphale isn’t wrong. They _are_ stumbling around in the dark, damning themselves. Crowley included. Hell, him most of all. He’d take it, though, over whatever the alternative was (blinding, white Jerusalem – l’etat c’est moi – the only grace you’re ever given).

He came to Berlin of his own volition at least.

And then the war is over.

The war is over some day.

They both like the Weimar era once the hyperinflation ebbs off. They like the big busy department stores at Potsdamer Platz on Wednesdays. They like the Panoptikum near Alexanderplatz where the matinée costs only a few Pfennig, they like the showgirls with their light laughter and even lighter dance.

“People are dreaming,” Aziraphale tells him (this is something of a game between them – Azirphale tells Crowley all the people’s thoughts and Crowley sits back with oranges or dark bitter chocolate from the Kolonialwarengeschäft and feeds him pieces for words), “now that it’s peace. Now that jobs are slowly coming back. Now that it'll be summer.”

Crowley breaks off a big, dark square of the chocolate bar and hands it over, then licks off the sticky residue of where it started to melt in his hand.

Aziraphale flinches at the violent thoughts of a young one-legged man limping past.

They watch the movie “Der Kongress tanzt” in the theatre seven times and neither of them can stop humming _Das gibts nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder._

Like the city, they are uneasily aware of their own power and refusing to looking at the future too much. And they are happy, while they can.

The years between 1933 and 1945 teach Crowley only two things.

One is that humanity’s hell has far surpassed the devil’s.

The other is a sudden sympathy for Lot’s wife, who he only ever considered, in her inability to stop looking back, to be devastatingly human. When he stands over what is left of the Scheunenviertel, he understands the choice of it, he _begs_ for it – to be a pillar of salt in this city forever, the only parts of him ever leaving being the ones washed away as tears with the rain.

His prayer is not answered and he stays anyway.

It’s nothing he will be ever able to justify to himself. In this way, it’s not the only thing in this story.

“What do you miss most about Heaven?” The city is still smoking around them, which is the only way Aziraphale dares to ask the question, because the truth is, it’s _deserved,_ it would have deserved more, it would have deserved Sodom and Gomorrah, and yet, it _hurts._ He spent the war somewhere else and won’t say where, but there’s something in his eyes that tells Crowley that even heaven is scrambling, terrified of the ravenous hairless little apes and the drawling voice of a woman with red hair.

“Flying,” Crowley answers. He sounds surprisingly honest. Aziraphale thinks of an unbearable lightness and he thinks about the H-bomb. His wings feel heavy on his back.

The Reichstag is a ruin beneath them.

“Flying is easy,” he’s smiling. “You just have to throw yourself at the ground-”

and Crowley looks at him with that bitter, gentle look in his eyes that wants all the things they have no words for, and laughs, “-and miss.”

This world is no place for love. They sit at the feet of the Goldelse, which has changed positions over the last years, though neither of them mentions it. There are a lot of things they don’t mention. Everything, burning. The deafening silence where people should be.

This world is no place for love, but it’s the only place anyone ever gets.

“I wish I could fall,” Aziraphale says. It’s been almost two decades, the Wall is brand new and already covered in graffiti, another scar in this city that is only scars now. “They’re not doing that anymore, though, ever since God left. Angels are spread thin as it is.”

Crowley doesn’t mention the searing pain when his wings were clipped and burned. All things considered, he’s been through worse now.

They spend an eternity in the no man’s land between the two German countries, looking for the Potsdamer Platz.

(They don’t find it.

They don’t ever find home.)

“You don’t.” Crowley answers, his hands are bloody, he’s digging through the rubble that’s still covering this part of the street. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for until he finds children’s shoes among the street, and then until he finds children’s feet.

It’s been decades. Children’s bodies shouldn’t lie in the dirt unburied for decades.

“I want to stop hearing them,” Aziraphale says. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

Superimposed over the Berlin that is real are all the Berlins that could have been, if anyone had ever been braver. The dream-Berlins are vibrant and happy and singing with life until they're deafening and collapsing under their own weight, covering reality in their ashes. Somehow, though, they are more persistent than the stones.

“I wish I could still hear them,” Crowley confesses. This is many nights later. This has been one long night until now. “Just to know that there is anything there at all.”

Aziraphale doesn’t say – almost everyone in this city is a murderer.

Aziraphale doesn’t ask – are we?

God left a long time ago and went somewhere and they don’t know where but it’s a half-comforting thought anyway because it implies that there is _somewhere._

God left so long ago that they maybe never even existed. All the other angels and demons stay clear of Berlin.

And still, every spring, there are flowers. There are new songs, and new people, and then one sudden November evening the Wall falls and there’s even a new Potsdamer Platz.

It’s not exactly where the old one was but it’s close enough that barely anyone notices.

The real Berlin is forever chasing, forever trying to imitate all its wildest aspirations at once, never completely being, always just _becoming,_ and always, always a few steps behind the dreams.

And one morning Crowley who is not a snake and is not an angel and is not a human climbs up to the Goldelse with a bundle of dandelions he picked on the way.

(They’re bright and yellow and exactly like they have been forever.)

And when he reaches the top, he finds Aziraphale, shivering, bloody, in his hand still the torch.

He smells the burning feathers more than he sees them, wings broken and burned and clipped, _what did you do_ he wants to whisper but the fear is like a lump in his throat and he runs and soothes and cries.

Aziraphale smiles at him with godforsaken eyes that are gentle and hungry and says, “The marching orders came today, they want to start the apocalypse”

and he lifts up his hand with the flame – it’s still burning

and smiles “but I am of no use for them now.”


End file.
